Getting Preventive Care Until It’s Almost Worthless
To identify the most effective preventive services, the federal government and most insurers rely on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an advisory body that reviews evidence on tests and services and grades effectiveness from A to D, giving an A or B to those shown to be most effective. By 2013 under the new law, close to 90 million Americans with employer and individual health policies will no longer have to pay a co-payment or deductible for recommended preventive screenings with an A or B grade.
Ned Colange, chairman of the task force…says the task force doesn’t analyze cost-effectiveness. Rather, it weighs evidence of whether the benefits of preventive services outweigh potential harms or downsides for different populations—such as a test that may have many false positives and lead to further tests or invasive procedures with risks of their own.
Full article on the free preventive care services under ObamaCare.
Why am I not surprised? You wouldn’t expect to see a cost benefit standard in Obama Care would you?
Making preventive screenings free is likely to be yet another subsidy for higher income and better educated people (who are more likely to take advantage of all the free stuff available). If these tests are effective, we’ll likely see an increase in the existing disparities of health outcomes by income and race.
The whole point of the U.S. Preventative Task Force is to make recommendations about the trade-offs of cost versus benefits. For instance, the benefit between a women getting mammograms every year starting at age 40-year versus 50-year old women getting mammograms every two years is very small. Yet the difference in cost is huge.
The whole idea of first dollar coverage, which many people in health care still believe in, is in effect an endorsement of giving people an incentive to consume care until it’s marginal value is zero.
Devon, if I recall correctly the Commission doesn’t do the type of cost-benefit analysis you describe. On mammograms, the Commission reference papers clearly say that if people are interested in saving lives then mammograms should be given to 40-year-olds. If people are interested in saving money, the 40-year-olds should be dropped.
It doesn’t take the next step and try to weight how much the 40-year-old lives are worth. That will be up to faceless bureaucrats working for ObamaCare.
@ Linda
I worked on a project about 10 years ago using the handbook from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. I apparently confused my memory of that project with some work by Tammy Tengs and John D. Graham for the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.
I find the article interesting. Is it any shock that most adults aren’t doing colon cancer screening? It’s not like getting your nails done. Even if it were free, I wouldn’t be running for a spot in line. Same with mammograms and pap smears.
Call me when all you need is a strand of my hair or a vial of blood.
“Prevention is better than cure” and Govt. cant provide us with quality preventive service the nation is going to suffer for that.
Virginia, there’s some evidence from the realm of “behavioral economics” (which is a redundant term, because economics is about human behavior), which suggests that a “free-market” health-insurance policy that covered only catastrophic costs would charge a high premium and then pay you a bounty for coming in for preventive screening.
The net cash flows would be the same as a consumer-driven plan that doesn’t pay for preventive care, but people just seem to like getting paid to do things!
However, mandating “free” preventive care will not only lead to higher premiums (or higher taxes and subsidies) but also facilitate risk selection by health plans, i.e. seeking to enrol healthier people. That is likely why the health plans did not lobby against this under Obamacare.
Prevention costs less then treatment.
No preventative mammogram? Possible late stage cancer.
Preventative mammogram catches early stage cancer? Possible Lumpectomy.
Which costs more?
Or is the real question; who earns more?
I absolutely agree with Erik. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Example: It’s simpler and much more cost effective to diagnose a diabetic early in the disease, educate him regarding the disease and potential complications, then supply him with insulin and syringes. A lifetime of these supplies will cost a fraction what it costs to treat a single diabetic disorder such as kidney damage leading to dialysis, blindness, peripheral artery disease leading to infections and amputations, coronary artery diseases leading to costly heart catheterizations and bypass grafts.